Page 98 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“And if you don’t come back?”

I looked at him levelly, trying not to let on how much that question scared me. “That means it didn’t work.”

• • •

Hauling the second bomb through the void was even more difficult than the first. The air wasn’t just thick—it pushed back against me, like it was trying to shove me all the way out of the void and out into the daylight. I kept going, forcing my way through with a degree of effort that had never been present before, not once, not even when I’d been fighting the crossroads for the tiny scraps of autonomy I could wrest out of their clutches. By the time I dropped back into the living world in the basement of Penton Hall, my forehead was covered with sweat, my mouth was dry, and my heart was hammering. All signs of exhaustion in a living person who actually had a body.

The most upsetting thing was that I couldn’t make itstop. Since my body is more a courtesy than a structure, I can normally decide whether I want to do things like breathe, or sweat, or have a heartbeat. I didn’t feel like carrying bombs through the space between the twilight and the daylight was bringing me back to life, but I couldn’t stop my body from mimicking the signs of life in extreme distress, either.

I dropped the bomb to the stony floor with a clang and caught myself against the pillar, propping myself up for the stability it offered. Sarah and Antimony both looked at me with obvious concern.

“Well?” I asked. “Get it where it needs to go.”

I didn’t help them as they rolled the bomb into place against the base of the pillar. Again, Antimony packed additional explosives around the bomb, stealing guilty little glances at the shelves around us the whole time. The mice hadn’t come back yet. I wasn’t sure how she was planning to carry out a full evacuation of a structure this size, but hopefully it would be possible.

Sarah didn’t help, just stood back and watched, her pupils faintly filmed over in white. Once I thought I could stand up on my own, I pushed away from the pillar and moved over toward her. “You good?” I asked.

“I am monitoring our surroundings for signs that we’ve been noticed,” she said. “There have been none, as yet. We are undiscovered. The mice are difficult to track—their minds are so simple that I have trouble distinguishing them from one another, and there are plenty in the walls here—but I believe they have reached their destination, and will hopefully return in short order. I have located the caretakers responsible for the school-age children, and implanted the idea that they want to take their charges for a moonlit stroll. Most, if not all of them should be outside before the bombs go off.”

She sounded so calm that it was tempting to just believe her and decide that nothing could possibly go wrong. As Antimony finished packing her plastic explosives, she straightened, turning to the two of us.

“One more,” she said.

“Yeah.” I couldn’t feign enthusiasm at the thought of making that trip again. It would have been dauntingwithtime to rest. As it was, I sort of wanted to throw up, which was not a sensation I had any real lingering familiarity with. I shuddered, and fell into step as Sarah led us to the other side of the basement, and another support pillar.

“Here?” I asked.

She nodded. “Here. This is where we— Mary? Are you all right?”

I blinked. Sarah was staring at me, frowning deeply. “I’m fine. Why?”

“Your eyes,” she said, voice gone slow and heavy with concern. “You’re crying blood.”

“Oh. That’s just a thing that happens to ghosts sometimes,” I said, waving her concern away. I wasn’t lying, exactly; weeping blood is definitely a thing that happens to ghosts. Other kinds of ghost. Not me. Neither babysitters nor crossroads negotiators become more effective when we scare the living crap out of people. But I was yanking power out of the anima mundi like it was going out of style, and it made sense for it to be burning out a few channels in the process.

“If you’re sure...”

“I’m sure.” I was not, in fact, sure. But we needed to finish this, or everything we’d done so far would have been for nothing. I forced a smile I didn’t feel and disappeared, back into the molasses-thick air of the void. This time, I coulddefinitelyfeel the anima mundi watching my passage, and her sorrow as she did. She couldn’t save me from the consequences of my own choices, and she couldn’t help me except by allowing me this one final burst of freedom, but she could watch, and she could grieve.

Her grief was palpable enough to be disturbing. I was doing what I had told her I was going to do, with her permission and according to her rules. But it was eating me—not alive, but I guess eating me dead at the same time, and my mortal haunting couldn’t contain much more. And I couldn’t stop. I was saving my family. I was breaking the momentum of a war, even if I wasn’t bringing the war to a true ending. I was serving her interests. And yet she watched me go like she was watching a star fall, burning up as it hit the atmosphere.

Panting, I dropped back into the kitchen in Ohio. Alex, who had been waiting there for me to return, recoiled.

“Mary, your eyes...” he said.

“Huh?”

He didn’t answer in words, just pulled out his phone, opened the camera, and flipped it around so that when he held the screen toward me, I could see myself.

Sarah hadn’t been exaggerating: I was weeping blood, thick red tears running down my hollow cheeks, only to vanish as they dripped from my chin. My shirt was clean, and I was obscurely relieved by that fact. I’ve known too many ghosts who somehow managed to stain the spectral idea of their clothes, and have had to wander around haunting people looking like they need to do their laundry. My mother would have been so ashamed if I’d become one of them.

The tears were distressing. My eyes were worse. They had gone a deep reddish-black from side to side, like clots of curdled blood. I could still see perfectly well, which wouldn’t have been the case if I’d been alive, but what I couldn’t see was how this was an improvement over my customary empty-highway stare.

“That’s different,” I said, refusing to let myself cringe away from the phone. Decades of seeing small children with naturalist bents through their infancy has left me remarkably able to summon stoicism when necessary. If I don’t flinch at dead racoons or living bloodworms, I’m not going to flinch at some fucked-up eyeballs, even when they’re mine. “But I have a job to do. Can you help me with the third bomb?”

“Mary, you look exhausted.”

“Iamexhausted. But we don’t have anyone else who can do this. Even if she were here, the rules are different for Rose. Sarah’s got to stay with Antimony and the mice, or she won’t be able to handle the evacuation.” If Sarah came to get this bomb and Annie was alone when the Covenant finally realized they had guests in their basement...No. My exhaustion wasn’t an excuse for taking that kind of risk. It never could have been. “So please. Will you help me?”

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